Paulson lamented his place in history at the Global Business Travel Association’s conference in Denver this week. Last year, he came out with a book called “On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System.” But does anybody care? Is anybody listening? Hello? In case you haven’t noticed amid the ceaseless economic calamities, this guy saved the world.

Since 2008, ugly partisan politics have led many to forget it was Paulson and President George W. Bush who pushed for the monstrous anathemas to free-market capitalism that now define our times.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program, the nationalization of mortgage behemoths Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, the bailout of rogue financial giants, including American International Group, and the doctrine of “too-big-to-fail.” These all began with a Republican administration suffering from the delusion that Wall Street was the answer to everything.

Henry Paulson

“I supported some very, very objectionable things in terms of bailouts or rescues, but I did it not for Wall Street, but for the American people,” Paulson said. “Because it would have been a huge catastrophe.”

Commercial lending would have ceased. Money-market funds would not have been able to pay back their depositors. ATMs would have stopped spitting out $20s.

“As Americans we shouldn’t like bailouts,” Paulson said. “Where I come from, if someone takes a risk and they’re going to make the profit from that risk, they shouldn’t have the taxpayer pay for the losses.”

But leave it to a guy who used to work for President Richard Nixon to decide that when you’re faced with an uncertain battle, you carpet bomb.

“It’s better to have the taxpayer pay for the losses than have the United States of America become an economic wasteland,” Paulson said. “If the financial system collapses, it’s really, really hard to put it back together again.”

Lately, it’s far from clear that America isn’t becoming an economic wasteland, or that the financial system would exist at all were it not for trillions in zero-interest loans from the Federal Reserve.

All Paulson may have done is propped up failed businesses and prolonged the inevitable. And President Barack Obama? He’s boldly carried Paulson’s dicey economic experiment forward.

Now what we may have is an economic crisis, plus a government with $14.5 trillion in debt and a credit downgrade. Pumping money into the top of the system didn’t stem the mortgage foreclosure mess that caused the crisis. Nor did it prevent depression-like unemployment that has now gnawed away at our economic prosperity for three years.

Paulson boasts TARP was a success, particularly since banks are repaying it. “It’s all going to come back,” he said. “It’s going to come back with a profit. And it prevented a collapse.” But it also enshrined the notion that whatever crazy risks banks want to take with other people’s money, the taxpayers will be there to absorb the losses.

The main reason Paulson can’t get the credit he thinks he is due for saving the world is because he was in charge of the folks who put the world in danger.

Under Paulson’s watch, Goldman churned out dodgy mortgage-backed securities and pretended they were golden, like everyone else. And before the 2008 collapse, Paulson was running around with the Fed’s Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, claiming subprime mortgage defaults would be contained and that the U.S. economy would remain healthy.

“The American people can remain confident in the soundness and the resilience of our financial system,” he said in September 2008 as Lehman Brothers filed bankruptcy and the financial world unwound.

What else can you say when there’s a run on the banks?

Paulson, who wanted to be a forest ranger when he was a boy, said he was reluctant to go to Washington, but felt a duty to serve.

“I could think of few people who went to Washington and came away with a higher reputation than what they started with,” Paulson said.

Maybe he should have listened to his mother.

“She just sobbed,” Paulson recalled, “and was very, very, very unhappy with me. She told me, ‘Listen, you started off with Richard Nixon, and ended up with George Bush. You should be ashamed of yourself.’”

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